Zoë and I wound up in Bristol on the Saturday before Christmas because my friend James was having a barbecue to mark the end of what he refers to as the “grilling season”. Its boundaries are somewhat amorphous, because James likes to barbecue at almost any opportunity, but as far as I can gather the grilling season starts around Easter and ends at some point before New Year’s Eve. I can’t say that with any confidence though, because I wouldn’t put it past James to grill meat in the dead of winter too: it would make more sense to you, if you’d met him.

But anyway it was an evening do, and that left me with one final lunch in Bristol before the year was out. And rather than try the hot new place – assuming I knew where the hot new place was, of course – or one of the Bristol restaurants on my radar like Bank, Native Vine or The Clifton, I decided to go for a safe bet. What can I say: it was the end of the year, my last opportunity to eat on duty in 2024 and, just this once, I wanted a guarantee of what the festive season always promises, comfort and joy. So I chose Bosco Pizzeria, situated near the top of Whiteladies Road, before it meets The Downs.

I first went to Bosco the best part of a decade ago, when it was very much Bristol’s pizza pioneer, and although I hadn’t been back for some time I always had it down as a reliable banker for somewhere good to eat in the city. Since it first opened its fortunes had ebbed and flowed, opening a second branch in Clifton, closing it and reopening it, closing the Whiteladies Road branch due to Covid and then taking a long old time to reopen due to a fire. Other branches in Cheltenham and Bath had followed, and a sister restaurant called Pizzucci offering a more American, less Italian experience down the Gloucester Road.

But I’d always seen it as a sure thing, and a standout even as other pizza restaurants came and went in Bristol. I reckoned it was as good as Flour and Ash – the original one on the Cheltenham Road that Jay Rayner got worked up about that is, not the sanitised relaunched one on Whiteladies Road which I haven’t visited. And for my money it was better than the much-hyped Bertha’s on Wapping Wharf, which wasn’t quite as good as I’d expected it to be. I couldn’t definitively say it was the best pizza in Bristol: after all I don’t live there, and I’m yet to try the likes of Pizzarova or CanCanPizza, but I could say that it took some beating.

And it was a lovely, busy spot the Saturday before Christmas. They’d slightly rejigged it since I was last there, the front section buzzy and full of smaller tables, the one out back made up of booths for larger groups. You could sit up at the bar, which some people were doing, and it had that lovely air of a place where people, like me, were putting their cares to one side for a couple of hours and treating themselves. Christmas decorations were tasteful and muted, wreaths in the window, baubles running along the tops of the banquettes. My wife took a photo of me, sitting there all happy: I liked it enough to use it as a Facebook profile picture.

Bosco’s menu was split into sections – about half a dozen if you count salads, which personally I rarely do. Apart from salads there were cicchetti, a selection of meats and cheeses, plenty of permutations of pizza, a small range of pasta dishes priced as mains and a few bigger dishes (or, as they put it, “large plates”) – ribollita, parmigiana and what have you. It was, I reflected as I tried to make choices, exactly the kind of menu you always hope to see in mainstream Italian chains but never do. It struck me as the sort of place Maidenhead’s Storia was aiming to be. Zoë sipped a very good negroni, I sipped arguably an even better negroni sbagliato and gradually we honed our selection, sequencing them like a mix tape.

The first slight stutter came when we ordered. I said we’d like a couple of cicchetti, then a mixture of meats and cheeses, then our pizzas.

“We’ll bring out all the smaller dishes at the same time, is that okay?” said our server.

Now, I very much wanted to say no, actually, we’re really happy to be here and we’re in no rush so can we have the cicchetti first, then the other bits and then the pizza, like we asked for? And I would have done, but my wife gave me a look which very clearly said could you not be a restaurant reviewer, just this once? so I kept my mouth shut. It hasn’t stopped me mentioning it here, obviously, but it did irk me – what was the rush? It had that feel that Wagamama always has, that the kitchen’s convenience is the primary concern, not your experience.

And it did literally all come out at once, in the space of a couple of minutes, causing not just a sequencing problem but a logistical one too, the table barely big enough to hold five small plates at once. We prioritised the calamari, as the only hot dish we’d asked for, and it was decent but flawed. The thing I’m always watching out for here is the bounce and twang of squid that needed to be fresher, and Bosco avoided that pitfall. But in its place were brittle sticks of squid, almost like Clifton Nik-Naks, which managed to be both pale and overcooked. We squeezed the lemon, dipped in the aioli but neither could totally redeem the raw materials.

The anchovies also misfired. These were billed as coming with salted butter – as they had at Brutto – and focaccia, and almost did but didn’t quite. Instead they came with very good focaccia but swimming in extra virgin, oilier than a Bluesky reply guy, shallot finely diced on top. Is it wrong that I took against them for still having the skin on? Maybe, but it fooled me for a second into thinking these were more like vinegary boquerones than taut, salty anchovies. That wasn’t right – they were intensely salty – but somehow the texture of them didn’t feel quite as I expected.

It was either cognitive dissonance or cognitive disappointment, but I couldn’t work out which. Three anchovies for seven pounds felt a little steep, but I guess you were paying for the focaccia as well. And I liked the focaccia, as I said, and I know it wouldn’t have gone as well with butter as with olive oil. But the whole thing felt a tad disjointed.

Bosco has always excelled for cheese and charcuterie, and the menu gives you an appealing range of both which you can mix and match in the most middle class multibuy of all time. My favourite of the cheeses was the one I neglected to photograph, a gorgeous Robiolo which was soft but not stinky, complex without being overpowering. It was great with the focaccia, which begged the question of how you’d eat it if you hadn’t ordered the anchovies. Almost as good was a Gorgonzola dolce which I liked and Zoë loved – simultaneously sweet and salty and very well balanced.

But again, without the focaccia it might have been messy to eat. I know that this kind of thing – getting in nice cheeses and cured meats, keeping the former well and slicing the latter thinly – is more about buying than cooking, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that many Italian restaurants don’t do this very well. Bosco’s years of experience showed in this respect, in cultivating excellent suppliers, buying the best stuff from them and not mucking it up. It can’t be that easy: if it was, it wouldn’t be so rare.

Oh, and the coppa was divine. Clearly sliced there and then, not exhumed from leaves of plastic, with that dryness and nuttiness that marks out the best specimens. This was the one thing that didn’t need bread at all, it just needed to be picked up and polished off, with or without a soupçon of cheese. The natural order had been restored, and I remembered just how good Bosco can be. We flagged someone down for another couple of sbagliatos: even though our reservation had been for a late lunch, the dining room showed no signs of thinning out.

Maybe the staff had got the message that we weren’t in a rush, or maybe they were just too busy to rush us, but there was a decent interval between our plethora of small plates and the main attraction.

Either way I was reminded, during that time, of lots of things: what a nice room it was, and how my many visits there had all been at different stages in my life, during a decade where almost everything about my life – what I did for a living, who I did it for, where I lived and who I lived there with – had changed, the only constant being this blog. I’d never been to Bosco with Zoë, and it made me happy to share this room with her at the end of a year itself full of changes.

I was also reminded, almost as much, just how nice a well made negroni sbagliato can be, but that’s probably beside the point.

Zoë and I reverted to type in ordering our mains, that comfort and joy thing again. Her pizza was the ventricina, a very Zoë choice with spicy salami, chilli oil and honey. She loved it, as I expected she would, and it showcased what Bosco did really well – an exemplary base, a chewy, bubbled crust with plenty of blistering, a deep tomato sauce, winningly fruity. This was as good an advert for Bosco as you could hope for, and at thirteen-fifty I thought it was solid value, especially benchmarked against restaurants closer to home like Zia Lucia.

That I didn’t enjoy my pizza as much just goes to show that you can get the fundamentals bang on and then fluff it with the whistles and bells. I too had asked for my archetypal pizza preference, sometimes called the Neopolitan and sometimes, as here, the Venetian. Either way, it’s the old anchovy, olive, caper trifecta and it’s always my go to when I visit a pizza place, providing it’s on.

The base was still exemplary, so was the sauce, so what went wrong here? A few things, really. The anchovies were unevenly distributed, Franco Manca style, leaving a reasonable amount of surface area salt-free. And the anchovies (skinless this time, to be fair) were too much fish and not enough salt, although that might have been a personal preference.

And what about the capers? Apparently they were fried in this case, which can work brilliantly – Buon Appetito used to do this – but they seemed anonymous. There weren’t enough of them, and what there were didn’t contribute the acetic sharpness I wanted. This pizza is meant to be all about salt and vinegar, but instead it was more fish and mild disappointment.

Hey ho. It wasn’t a bad pizza, it just wasn’t as good as I knew it could be. The slightly haphazard timing, coupled with our gluttony, meant we ate too much too quickly and were too full for dessert, so we settled up. Our meal, including two negronis apiece and an optional 12.5% service charge, came to just over one hundred and six pounds. I didn’t begrudge that: besides, they had Aesop handwash in their very fetching loos, and that stuff doesn’t pay for itself. We called up an Uber and prepared ourselves to have a few drinks with James and Liz ahead of the official end of the grilling season. Well, maybe after a nap to sleep off some of those carbs.

It was a lovely evening, incidentally. The beers flowed thick and fast – James is the man who has turned his garage into a micropub – and the conversation was enormous fun. We got to bed well after midnight, too tired for the traditional couples debrief. But during the gathering somebody who knows that I write this blog asked me if I’d gone anywhere on duty at lunchtime and I said yes, I’d been to Bosco.

“I hear it’s not as good as it used to be, would you agree with that?” I was asked.

And the binary answer, although the world’s always more complicated than binary answers, is yes, I do agree. On my previous visits, Bosco was the place you wish would open near you, the place that could teach every Italian chain a thing or two. On this visit, although it was still good, it was closer in quality to those chains at their very best. The gap had narrowed, and not because the chains have upped their game. This is the point, often combined with expansion, at which independent restaurants need to take care.

But anyway, on that night – and, writing this now – it didn’t seem to matter quite so much. It was a very agreeable lunch, if not a perfect one, tucked away at the end of the year. If you asked me where to go for a rock solid reliable pizza in Bristol, I would still probably pick Bosco; it’s earned that latitude, because we go way back. And if one opened in Reading, all the Sarv’s Slices and Dough Bros in the RG postcode wouldn’t stop me paying it a more than occasional visit. Next time you’re in Bristol, if you want an absolute banker, I think Bosco is still that.

Bosco Pizzeria – 7.6
96 Whiteladies Road, Bristol, BS8 2QX
0117 9737978

https://www.boscopizzeria.co.uk

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